Hi Adrian,
The action attribute could contain any URL.
The point of the event handler is that it not only is able to *change* the
URL that the submission uses, but it is able to use the content from the
action attribute in the logic that does the change.
This is really handy because many of the dynamic URL use cases that I've
been seeing people hit all have a common main URL for the web application
and the dynamic part occurs in the additional URL parameters that should
be set by instance data.
So the action attribute could be omitted, or the form author could use it
as a convenient place to store that common prefix of the URL, then the
setvalue action just calls concat() to append the dynamic parts.
John M. Boyer, Ph.D.
Senior Product Architect/Research Scientist
Co-Chair, W3C XForms Working Group
Workplace, Portal and Collaboration Software
IBM Victoria Software Lab
E-Mail: boyerj@ca.ibm.com http://www.ibm.com/software/
Blog: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/JohnBoyer
Adrian Baker <adrian@fastmail.net>
04/26/2006 12:58 PM
To
John Boyer/CanWest/IBM@IBMCA
cc
Joern Turner <joern.turner@web.de>, Mark Birbeck
<mark.birbeck@x-port.net>, www-forms@w3.org, www-forms-request@w3.org
Subject
Re: Dynamic @action attribute on xforms:submission
John Boyer wrote:
This keeps coming up over and over and over again.
We have discussed AVTs numerous times in the past in face to face
meetings, as well as other
more hacky ideas like dropping a submission into instance data...
The solution we agreed to do for XForms 1.1 would provide the 'action' as
a component of
event context in xforms-submit so that an action handler could run a
setvalue to change it.
This also allows us to add other stuff to the event context, like content
header, that need to
be changed. This would allow us to do *all* dynamic configuration of
submit using a single
mechanism that can be further extended over time.
The reason why this is not already in any specs of the working group is an
issue that I am
going to flip over to the working group mailing list.
Moreover, since we have only recently decided to move our technical
discussions to the
public list to give the community a better idea of how much stuff we work
on, the prior discussions
of this issue containing markup examples are in the group mailing list
archive, not the public archive.
So, here is an example:
<xf:submission action="blah" ...>
<xf:setvalue ev:event="xforms-submit" ref="event('action')"
value="some/node/in/instance"/>
</xf:submission>
What goes in "blah" - some sort of dummy value which is ignored? Isn't
this a bit unfortunate?
Adrian
Cheers,
John M. Boyer, Ph.D.
Senior Product Architect/Research Scientist
Co-Chair, W3C XForms Working Group
Workplace, Portal and Collaboration Software
IBM Victoria Software Lab
E-Mail: boyerj@ca.ibm.com http://www.ibm.com/software/
Blog: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/JohnBoyer